The Snowflake Chronicles

Coincidence

3 Nur 163 B.E. – June 6 – 7, 2006 A.D.

Coincidence is a beautiful word used to explain random and, seemingly, unrelated incidents that occur to a single person within a short period of time. I looked the word up on dictionary.com and found three intriguing definitions. The first definition refers to objects that inhabit “the same relative position … in space.” The second definition refers to events, which although they occur accidentally, but have the appearance of planned events. The third definition refers to two things happening at the same time.

I don’t believe in coincidences, which doesn’t mean that coincidences don’t exist and don’t occur. Just because a person doesn’t believe in something doesn’t make that thing nonexistence, any more the believing in something means that it exists. OK, now I’m being philosophical. I’m not saying that I haven’t had seeming coincidences occur in my life. However, when they do occur it’s because God, the Universe, the Fates, the Graces or Quantum Machines (whatever one wants to call it) is attempting to teach me something.

The weird, wonderful, off the wall, happenstances, concurrences, conjunctions, coincidences, and co-occurrences the thrust themselves upon me, usually happen because I’m either not paying attention to what I’m doing or I’m letting other nonessential and irrelevant worries or events distract my attention. When I’m paying attention to what I’m doing I see the black and white waiting at the stop light for someone to push the yellow light so the officer can give out another ticked. When I’m paying attention to what I’m doing I see the car aiming directly at my passenger door, because the driver thinks I’m invisible.

The truth is I enjoy the apparent coincidences that regularly occur in my life. True some of them send chills up my spine and cause me to do a double take, but they keep life from getting boring and teach me well-needed lessons. When these things do occur, I use the word coincidence because I have no better word to explain what’s happening at the time. Maybe a better term would be phrase such as the Laws of Quantum Machines or God’s sense of humor, I don’t know because I’ve never really thought much about it before. Usually I more interested in figuring out the lesson so that I don’t have to go through the same series of events again. It gets monotonous going through the same series of events over and over and over again because I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.